Talking to Strangers

Very, very insightful. This was the first Gladwell I’ve read, and it did not disappoint. I now understand why people talk so highly of him as an author; he is able to stitch together seemingly disperse examples (in this case the Penn State athletic director scandal, instances of police violence, the Knox case, Madoff, and others) into a coherent sociological and behavioral thesis about human nature. The book’s argument, on its face, strikes you hard as immediately correct when you are exposed to it. Humans absolutely had a threshold bias towards believing that someone else is truth before they are able to make the realization in the opposite direction (people are also truly bad at understanding strangers compared to their ability to comprehend the microexperssions of those we know well).